BLOG OF FINTAN COSTELLO - MOSTLY ABOUT WHERE DIGITAL MARKETING OVERLAPS WITH THE GAMBLING INDUSTRY.

Sep 1 Go Drone or Go Home

26,000 people (and me) watched someone from UniLad smash an Android phone with a hammer live on Facebook. This is more people than can fit into a lot of premier league football grounds. Not, only that but the video lived on and within the space of four days, 1.3 million people had replayed the footage.

The footage was not even that interesting, the production quality was “camera phone” and the content was an old model android phone and not even the recalled Samsung Note 7 (they missed a zeitgeist opportunity here) getting bashed with a hammer, run under a tap and then flushed in a toilet.

At the same in a typical month over 200 million hours of eSports watch time is happening on Twitch. In August an eSports Tournament “The International” took place in Seattle, the tournament was watched live by 17,000 fans in the arena and another 5 million+ online. The prize pool was crowd funded from ticket sales and over 20million USD was awarded to the 16 teams, with the first place Chinese team taking home over 9 million USD.

When we move over to Youtube and look at the various Redbull sports channels, we can see that they have a cumulative 1.6 billion video views of their videos and that’s just what gets watched on YouTube!

If we bring the focus to eGaming, recently we had a smart affiliate video that went viral. The focus of the video was making the online live dealers accidently read out a funny user name “Peter Ness” or P.Ness for short and recorded the reactions. Over 1.8 million people have watched the video and thousands of viewers have clicked the affiliate-tracked links to casinos the affiliate has embedded in the content.

PokerStars have recently launched their new web TV series “PokerStars Duels” which is an excellent made for web series, involving heads up poker between celebrities Cristiano Ronaldo vs Aaron Paul is my favourite. It’s filmed in a fight club-esque style, excellent content and is doing extremely well on YouTube and Facebook easily racking up millions of views in a few days.

When we scan the rest of the gambling industry with a couple of exceptions including the banter kings PaddyPower, bookmakers in general are coming up very short on the engagement scale. I think it’s time for bookmakers to admit that putting a pundit in front of a camera and doing a boring 3-minute betting preview is just a complete waste of everyone’s time. At best these videos get a couple of thousand views but more likely a few hundred (or less). What is even harder to measure is the impact on the brand. Is a punter going to think more or less favorably if they see a poor video from a bookmaker? You’d feel confident saying it has a negative impact on brand and a cynic would argue if no one watches the videos they wont have any brand impact anyway.

Producing engaging content is difficult, your videos are competing against every video on the Internet, be it a funny gif all the way to Game of Thrones for a users attention. The only way to win is to respect your competition and respect your audience. Take a hammer to boring videos and be interesting!

Currently based in Amsterdam, but destined to live his life as a global nomad, this is the blog of Fintan Costello. From here you'll find the latest articles (eGaming Review and other publications) published by Fintan as well as speaking engagements and contact details.